In 1986, Scribner published “Hatteras Light” by Philip Gerard, a novel about U-boat warfare along North Carolina’s Outer Banks during World War I, and its impact on the islanders.

Gerard — who used to camp out on Hatteras Island during summers in high school and college — always meant to write a sequel. “But I got busy,: he told an audience Monday night for Prologue, the monthly book club co-sponsored by the StarNews and public radio station WHQR.

Eventually, Gerard’s wife Jill pestered him to finish it. “Essentially, this was her Christmas present,” said the author, a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

That novel, “Dark of the Island,” came out earlier this month from John F. Blair, the venerable Winston-Salem publisher that put out the paperback edition of “Hatteras Light” and also released “Cape Fear Rising,” Gerard’s 1994 novel about the Wilmington riot of 1898.

It’s dedicated “To Jill.”

Gerard said his lead character, Nick Wolf, was modeled on a friend, an ace reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who was worn down covering zoning boards and suburban town councils. He begged for more exciting assignments but was told, “You make this stuff interesting.”

Gerard’s friend eventually went freelance, but Nick Wolf goes to work, essentially as a corporate shill for a small oil company that’s seeking to drill in the Atlantic off Cape Hatteras.

At the same time, he’s seeking to solve a family mystery. In the process, the action hops back and forth between the 1940s and the 1990s and involves Nazi saboteurs, the Normandy invasion and combat in the South Pacific. (One character serves aboard the battleship USS North Carolina.)

Gerard says the title comes from an old island custom, when some Hatterasmen would wait till nights when the moon was down, then lead an old horse with a light around its neck along the beach. If they were lucky, a ship would mistake the lantern for the Hatteras Lighthouse, take a wrong turn and run aground on the island’s shoals. Then the islanders could cash in, salvaging the wreck’s cargo and fittings. (As tourists learn every summer, this is how the community of Nags Head got its name.)

Gerard said he did most of his research off the Internet. He was grateful to a former student, Cindy Ramsey, who wrote the oral history “Boys of the Battleship North Carolina.”

The hardest part of writing the second book, he said, was “I had to get the music back in my head.” By that he meant the distinct accent of Hatteras natives; it had rung in his head while he was in graduate school in Arizona, which is how “Hatteras Light” got started.

Gerard says he’s a morning person, who starts out early every day in his study — “the dog is allowed in, but not my wife” — works for a few hours, breaks to take the dog for a walk and then works for a few hours more.

He quoted the novelist John Gardner (“Grendel,” “October Light”), with whom he once studied, who once said there are just two plots: (1. Somebody goes on a journey or (2. a stranger comes to town. “Dark of the Island,” he noted, managed to straddle both.

He emphasized again that any resemblance between his cast and actual Hatteras Island residents is purely coincidental, and that he had rearranged the island’s geography slightly for dramatic convenience.

Gerard said a third Hatteras novel is in the works. (“Hatteras Light” and “Dark of the Island” are written to be read separately, he said, and he thinks each stands alone.) The new one, he added, shouldn’t take another 30 years.

If you missed Prologue, Gerard will give a reading from “Dark of the Island” and a talk at 3 p.m. Saturday, March 19, at Pomegranate Books, 4418 Park Ave.

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About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.